[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

The debate, so far:

Liberalmedia: "Let's make blacks distrust the police!"

Me: "Why?"

"Because Black Lives Matter!"

"...Except when they get killed by criminals, right? Because more blacks get killed by criminals than by police."

"The fact that more blacks get killed by criminals than by police is also a reason to distrust the police".

"Huh?"

"Police fail to protect blacks from criminals, because blacks don't trust the police."

"That's just what I was saying."

Without trust of the police, we will have no civilization!

"That's just what I was saying."

"I know! Listen up black people, keep distrusting the police! F*** the police! F*** the police!"

I know it sounds like some kind of straw-man caricature, but read this liberalmedia article which I've been paraphrasing:

Critics of racial disparities in the criminal justice system often get asked a single question: "But what about black-on-black crime?" The rhetorical question is meant to argue that if you really think black lives matter, you should be more worried about black-on-black homicides that take thousands of lives each year, not police brutality and mass incarceration. That, defenders of police say, is the real racial problem in criminal justice today.

But in her new book Ghettoside, journalist Jill Leovy argues that the abhorrent levels of black-on-black homicide and other racial disparities in the criminal justice system are two sides of the same coin — as summarized by this great paragraph:

Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

Under this argument, black Americans are exposed to both neglect and over-policing by the criminal justice system.

Okay, sounds reasonable so far. I would advise against the term "over-policing", it's not that there is a dial somewhere that you turn to the proper policing level. The problem is that the policing is being done poorly. If someone is driving in the wrong direction, you don't call it "over-driving", you just say they're driving poorly.

On one hand, the criminal justice system is highly active in black communities, but typically with a focus on petty offenses. Stop and frisk in major US cities targets drugs and other nonviolent crimes. The brutal arrest and death of Eric Garner, a black man in New York City, came about after he allegedly sold untaxed cigarettes. Courts and police in Ferguson, Missouri, focused on low-level crimes to raise revenue through fines and court fees from black residents.

Sounds like they are out there, meeting people every day. Why, they must be on a first-name basis with everyone. Hardly an "occupying army".

Now for the part I was paraphrasing in my debate above:

As Charis Kubrin, criminologist at the University of California Irvine, told me, people are much less likely to cooperate with police if they feel that cops are harassing them on a daily basis. "People don't feel like they can go to the police even if they've witnessed crimes, because they don't trust the police, and there's antagonism there," she said. "And police can't do the job on their own — they need the community to help them."

Police have a harder time getting their jobs done when they don't have community cooperation. A study published in the National Institute of Justice Journal, for example, found murders are a lot more likely to be solved when police officers are faster at securing a scene, notifying homicide detectives, and identifying witnesses. All of these tasks are easier if locals are willing to cooperate.

What's worse, police's inability to solve crimes can lead to more lawlessness. As Leovy notes in Ghettoside, people are more likely to take matters into their own hands — and resort to violence — if they no longer believe that the criminal justice system will protect them. Putting an end to retaliatory violence, which can be rooted in even small and personal disputes about relationships, is one of the reasons we have a criminal justice system in the first place, Leovy wrote:

In the dim early stirring of civilization, many scholars believe, law itself was developed as a response to legal "self-help": people's desire to settle their own scores. Rough justice slowly gave way to organized state monopolies on violence. The low homicide rate of some modern democracies are, perhaps, an aberration in human history. They were built, as the scholar Eric Monkkonen said, not by any formal act, but "by a much longer developmental process whereby individuals willingly give up their implicit power to the state."

Got that? "Blacks don't trust police, and that makes murderers get away with it, and even creates a situation where vigilantes become gangs become warlords and that's the end of civilization...

...So let's keep spreading distrust of the police!"